Creating a personalized, customer-focused environment reveals to buyers that your business is easy and friendly to work with. There is no better way to convey an outstanding customer experience than offering helpful, useful information that prospects can readily access.
A recent study by eMarketer shows that US consumers are choosing small businesses because of the personalized experiences they provide compared with larger corporate-owned businesses. Consumers favor small businesses because of their customer focus.
Factors that US Consumers Consider of High Importance When Choosing a Small Business:
- 86% Customer service, customer-focused
- 84% Personal, intimate, human, face-to-face
- 84% Knows customers and their needs
- 84% Easy to do business with
- 83% Local, close-by, convenient
- 83% Has a website, uses Social Media
- 82% Reliable, consistent, there when you need them
- 81% Owner-operated, committed, accountable
Which one of these are important to you? In a world of Social signals and online ratings, your content should convey each and everyone of these factors.
Content marketing means getting the right message to the right consumer at the right time.
Not everyone is ready to buy. You may have become used to broadcasting messages to the masses. Today, your content can reach a more targeted audience by advertising to those who are ready to buy. With a solid content marketing strategy, you can also remain relevant to those in the market not-right-now-but-will-be-at-some-point-in-the-future. A well-developed content strategy identifies each one of those buyer personas and designs the most ideal content for each to enjoy.
Is the content on your website, blog and Social Media profiles coming up short?
Consumer adoption of social, mobile and internet technologies is covering a wider breadth and moving at a much greater speed than conventional wisdom had predicted. Attracting buyers to your business requires a much more robust marketing strategy than you may have realized.
When 83% of consumers surveyed say they choose a business because of their online presence, shouldn’t you be constantly improving your customer experience through content marketing? If you can capture 83% of buyers with helpful, useful content that solves rather than sells, that’s the ticket to more business, more leads, more sales.
Customer experience drives loyalty and word-of-mouth.
Customer experience is more powerful in driving customer loyalty than even the perception of value received for a given price. Successfully conveying what it’s like to do business with you sparks conversations. Blog and Social Media content starring your employees and/or customers (what I call “Hyper-local content”) drives high engagement and sets your business apart from everyone else.
Content marketing improves your online reputation.
You may find yourself in a crisis situation or that your online reviews are not reflective of the outstanding customer experience you deliver. Leveraging content skillfully can remedy even the most extreme cases. This is where public relations and content marketing intersect. Plan ahead. Learn how to respond in a crisis. Implement an internal process for building your online reviews and reputation. Keep online prospects informed about how you’ve handled even the most outrageous situations. Everyone knows you’re not perfect; they just want to see that you’re human, accountable and committed.
It’s important to say that you can’t price your way out of a negative customer experience. There’s a BMW dealership whose Yelp are dismal. They score 2 stars on Yelp and 1.5 stars on Google+ with a total of nearly 400 reviews. That’s not a review, that’s a consensus. What’s an online prospect going to do when they see that? Run for the hills.
I would call that a crisis situation. There’s no time to waste. Not only would you need a solid content marketing plan to address this consensus but also an in-depth review of company culture. A training curriculum for everyone involved in this raging forrest fire of negative experiences should also be considered.
Content marketing builds lasting relationships and future business.
Keep listening to your customer, get to know them inside and out. The more you know your ideal customer, the better your content will be. Reaching every potential buyer is not easy but recognizing what they want or might need and then providing it increases your chances exponentially.